Social schemas are subjective theories about the social environment which influence how individuals process information, how they make judgments, attributions, and inferences about the elements of this environment, and how they decide upon a course of action. They represent the ways in which the social world has been differentiated and articulated in memory. The research proposed here examines the structure and function of schemas about the self as instances of social schemas. The functions of self-schemas will be studied by examining the influence of schemas on information processing. Empirical investigations are designed to investigate the influence of schemas 1) on the content of schema-related judgments and decisions, 2) on the processing time necessary for these judgments and decisions, 3) on the quality, content, and patterns of recognition and recall of schema-related materials, and 4) on selective attention to schema-related material. The structure of self-schemas will be examined by a systematic analysis of verbal protocols which reveal the content of the subjects' schemas, and by multi-dimensional scaling. The proposed studies will attempt to provide converging evidence for the schema construct and to determine whether, as hypothesized, self-schemas operate as selective and directive mechanisms that result in differential attention to, and processing of, information about the self. A further objective of this research is to explore how the methodology of modern cognitive psychology can be productively used to examine cognitive representations of the social world.